Plot
The world has left the 70s behind, and news broadcasting has followed suit with anchorman Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell), firing him and promoting his enemy-turned-wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate). However, with the creation of 24-hour rolling news, he’s given the opportunity to get his old team together – field reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carrell), and sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner) – to take the world of news by storm again.
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| Damn, that is one peculiar perm. |
Review
The first Anchorman epitomised what we mean by that old adage ‘word-of-mouth.’ It was an unspectacular entity in the domestic box-office, a downright flop internationally, and seemed destined for the DVD bargain bin. But thanks to the outrageous commitment of a select group of fans, Anchorman became a runaway post-theatrical success, redefining the idea of being quotable and likely bastardising day-to-day communication for an entire generation. How many people love lamp these days?
Bottom line, its eventual success meant that a sequel was inevitable. And though it took nearly a full decade to come to fruition, the old team eventually staggered drunkenly into a bar to throw a follow-up together, the legend continues…
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| Life's hard when you're part Mexican. |
Anchorman 2 is an ‘exactly as it says on the tin’ sort of deal. The stars are the same, the writers and director, and the humour is unchanged. Equal parts asinine and borderline offensive, it’s been built from the ground-up to strengthen the Anchorman brand, littered with fan service from passing references to shameless riffs on its predecessor.
And while this proves to be a perfectly respectable tactic for a comedy sequel (hell, look at Hangover 2) it serves to demonstrate just how ‘fine’ Anchorman 2 is. It does nothing outwardly wrong, but puts little to no effort into making itself better than what came before, happy to simply rely on what worked last time (expect a nauseous amount of Brick this time around) in a narrative that never really matters.
Simply saying ‘black’ at a black person isn’t funny, it isn’t necessarily racist either as Ron is, for all intents and purposes, a manchild who doesn’t know any better and lacks any kind of social filter (that’s why we love him). It’s just lazy. And making the same gag over and over again, forcing it to be funny, is like listening to your friend explain their joke; it’s not that you don’t get it, it’s just shit. Same with the old ‘by the _____ of _____’ expression that was funny when it was used once in the first film; expect a few this time, and none to feel as fresh or effective.
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| This here is Kristen Wiig's 'female Brick.' Just in case there wasn't enough Brick in this film. |
Anchorman 2 is at its strongest when the news team are assembled, competing with each other in an ‘idiot-off,’ whether that be through their inadvertently revolutionary news casting or their frequent workroom bickers. It’s during these sequences that Anchorman 2threatens to be the laugh-a-minute, laugh-out-loud fest the trailers promise. And while this isn’t quite the case of ‘all the funny bits are in the trailer’ syndrome, its tumescent runtime makes the film wane and sag, like the middle-aged men the film now follows who can’t quite keep it up that long anymore. The weaker scenes don’t spoil the film as a whole package, but they do serve to highlight just how desperately the film needs a rigorous edit.
There’s a sequence in a lighthouse, complete with a pet-shark called Doby and a song in his honour that, truth be told, turns out to be one of the funniest and freshest sequences in the film. But does the film need it? Probably not. It extends the run time for little narrative purpose (though that is admittedly a minor concern for an Anchorman film) but more egregiously breaks up the delinquent foursome in a move that far too closely mirrors the first film seemingly just to show Ron bottle-feeding a baby shark. Anchorman isn’t funny just because or Ron (or Brick despite how hard Anchorman 2 tries) but when the four are together, and the more time the film spends away from that dynamic – for random excursions into ice-skating et al – the more everything whiffs of ‘missed opportunity.’
The quotable lines may remain, and the ridiculous OTT news-team battle royale (which is admittedly brilliant in its juvenile insanity – ‘it’s a werehyena!’), it ultimately feels just a little less than what came before.
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| Ron Burgandy, an adonis apparently. |
Verdict
Is it still worth a watch? Certainly. The characters remain the same likeable monsters they were before and the chemistry between the foursome is unmatchable, but maybe temper those expectations a tad.
3/5
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